Kamau Brathwaite

Christine Pagnoulle

RêvHaïti

Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Sun Poem

Elegguas

Edward Brathwaite

Here for the first time in a single volume is Edward Brathwaite's Caribbean trilogy - Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands - a brilliant exploration of the predicament of the contemporary New World Negro.Through the tension of jazz/folk rhythm, through historical flashbacks, and excursions to Europe, New York and Africa, the poet interweaves the past and present of his Caribbean homeland - its natural beauty, its violent history, the values that sustain its people - into a vigorous and distinctivepoetic statement.

A New World Trilogy

The Arrivants

Nathaniel Mackey

Literary Criticism. African American and Caribbean Studies. Kamau Brathwiate's CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY is based on the transcript of his discussion with Nathaniel Mackey at Poet's House in New York City. Brathwaite expansively elaborates on Mackey's (and audience member's) knowledgeable inquiries; his answers are layered with subsequent ruminations arising from his lifelong engagement with world literature and expressive cultures. A multiphasic drift, CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY combines elements of biography and autobiography with poetic discourse on Caribbean literary history and negative effects of colonial domination. Brathwaite splices dialog with poetry, criticism, and instrictive imaginary voices in his now distinct and characteristic Sycorax 'video style' format. Both Brathwaite and Mackey have several titles carried by SPD. Mackey's ERODING WITNESS is newly available, along with WHATSAID SERIF (City Lights) and DJOBOT BAGHOSTUS'S RUN (Sun & Moon) Brathwaite's BLAC

Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey

New work by the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement.

Born to Slow Horses

Here for the first time in a single volume is Edward Brathwaite's Caribbean trilogy - Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands - a brilliant exploration of the predicament of the contemporary New World Negro. Through the tension of jazz/folk rhythm, through historical flashbacks, and excursions to Europe, New York and Africa, the poet interweaves the past and present of his Caribbean homeland - its natural beauty, its violent history, the values that sustain its people - into a vigorous anddistinctive poetic statement.

Poetry. African American Studies. Kamau Brathwaite was born in Barbados in 1930, and found a rootedness in Africa that would sharpen his sense of "wholeness" and shape his awareness. His published works have surged his international standing, but since MIDDLEPASSAGES (1992, also available from SPD), the literary world has seemingly been expecting another major volume of poetry from him. WORDS NEED LOVE TOO represents that long awaited collection, and is, perhaps, Brathwaite's most concentrated effort at fashioning a new literary tradition out of the fragmented pieces/rhythms/nation languages that form the New World. The poems in this volume are "dreamstories." It is a harvest of dreams of a new word, cleansed in ancestral blood, loved without reservation by those born into it and with it, so that through it, they can shape a new reality, a new destiny. No other poet, living or dead, makes us participants in, and co-celebrants of, the liturgy of the word like Brathwaite.

Words Need Love Too

Poetry. Drama. Caribbean Studies. Typeset "performance" in Brathwaite's trademark Sycorax Video Style. LIVITICUS is "a monument to sorrow that cherishes our origins . as we live our lives of Modern distraction," according to the Pulitzer-nominated writer Garrett Hongo.

Liviticus

"In its title, Strange Fruit refers to the song of a lynching made famous by Billie Holiday and to the malign persecution that drove Kamau Brathwaite from his New York home to resettlement in his native Barbados. But the title also points to the enigma of beauty created out of that experience of cultural lynching, in poems of urgency, elegance, wisdom and brave humour. ... It is a collection full of beauties of form, phrase and sound, such as in the poem “Sleep Widow” where instead of finding comfort, the poet and loved woman “bull-fight like lock-horm logga-head until the evening pools the grief along our edges/ and cools us to this peace”, the very sounds in the poem fighting their way towards resolution."--Back cover.

Strange Fruit

Odale's Choice

These poems trace Brathwaite's African/Caribbean ancestry. Gives the reader what is effectively an account of the African diaspora, in the language of a great poet.

X/self

Shar

The Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica

"Ancestors startlingly reinvents one of the most important long poems of our hemisphere. Here in a single volume is Kamau Brathwaite's long unavailable, landmark trilogy - Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (1977, 1982, and 1987) - now completely revised and expanded by the author." "With its "Video Sycorax" typographic inventions and linguistic play, Ancestors liberates both the language and the new-Caliban vision of the poet. In its fresh and more experimental form the trilogy embodies the recapture (what the poet has called the "intercovery") of Brathwaite's African/Caribbean ancestry as a possession of power and renewal, even as it plumbs the deep tonalities of enslavement, oppression, and colonial dispossession."--BOOK JACKET.

A Reinvention of Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/self

Ancestors

The startling new work by internationally celebrated Caribbean poet, historian and cultural theorist Kamau Brathwaite, winner of the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize. In "DS (2)--Dreamstories 2"--Kamau Brathwaite continues his ongoing collection of prose poems, comprised of the broken images, flow, and half-told stories of dreams. The poetic stories in "DS (2)" use Brathwaite's trademark sycorax video style, offering personal revelations mixed with political and historical fables occurring around the globe. Brathwaite's prose poems relate with ardency and pathos the Caribbean experience and are a potent voice of the African diaspora. Nathaniel Mackey wrote: "Kamau Brathwaite's 'calibanic play' reveals a fiendish delight in the slippage to which words are prone." And "American Book Review" wrote: "In its rhythms as well as its explorations of 'nation language' and of the traces of an African past, this is a populist work." This exciting new offering by Kamau Brathwaite follows on the heels of the publication of Brathwaite's "Born to Slow Horses," which won the coveted 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Dreamstories

DS (2)

''Selection of papers presented at the Second Conference on Caribbean Culture held at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, January 2002, in honor of Kamau Brathwaite.''

Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite

Caribbean Culture

Kamau Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the major world poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Elegguas—a play on “elegy” and “Eleggua,” the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad—is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful “Poem for Walter Rodney.” Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds “nation-language,” that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts, as well as deliberate misspellings (“calibanisms”) and deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems. This collection is a stunning follow-up to Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Kamau Brathwaite

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